Stroke of genius

Page Tools

Is the cost of canvas and paintbrushes getting you down? Why not
go digital instead. For the price of a set of pastels, TwistedBrush
outfits you completely.

Choose from hundreds of brush styles, from Super Gritty Water
Fade to Exploding Water Crayon. Then select your medium: water
colours, felt markers, oil pastels, pencils, acrylics, you name it.
Create your work on canvas, linen paper, sandpaper, stretched silk
or any of more than a dozen other surfaces.

TwistedBrush provides supports for graphics tablets and pens, so
there's no need to rely on fine mouse control to achieve the
results you desire. Filters, masks and a variety of editing
functions round out the tools at your disposal.

You can also use TwistedBrush to demonstrate techniques by
running the built-in script recorder which records every brush
stroke you make. The program comes with pre-recorded scripts you
can view to see how others make use of the features.

Keeping information private, especially on a computer you share
with others, is not easy. It really should be a simple matter to
hide a folder, granting access only to those with the correct
authority or password, but it's not. Even the private folders in
Windows XP are not quite as inviolate as you may think.

Folder Shield does the job properly. Drag and drop folders into
the Folder Shield window to hide them, not just from casual
viewers, but from determined snoops. As far as anyone else is
concerned, the folders don't exist; they can't be touched by
applications, Windows Explorer or other file managers, or even via
a DOS command window. You, on the other hand, can get at them with
a quick key combination and an optional password.

The trial version of Folder Shield is fully functional. Just
make sure you unhide all your folders before the trial expires if
you decide not to purchase the full version.

It's easy enough to grab a quick snapshot of your screen in
Windows: press the PrintScreen key and an image of the entire
screen is copied to the clipboard; press Alt+PrintScreen and the
selected window is copied. You can then open up a graphics program,
paste the contents of the clipboard and save the image. Easy, but a
little involved. HoverSnap streamlines the procedure, turning it
into a single operation.

Start by telling HoverSnap what type of image you want to store,
JPG or BMP, PNG or GIF, and then tell it where to store the
screenshots. Once that's done, hitting PrintScreen or
Alt+PrintScreen will generate an image file automatically, while
hitting Ctrl+PrintScreen lets you drag a box around a section of
the screen to grab just that section.

You can even tell HoverSnap to resize the image on the fly,
while the Auto-Generate Filename option lets you capture image
after image, naming them automatically.

HoverSnap has one quirk: the first time you run the program, you
should configure it and then close it. This will create an ini file
needed by the program. Open HoverSnap once more and you'll be all
set.

Usually, the clipboard stores the last item you copied or cut,
keeping it available until you close Windows and the memory is
purged. That system works well, unless you happen to work with huge
chunks of data, such as large image, audio or video files. Then you
may find the clipboard soaking up resources and affecting Windows'
performance. ClipClear lets you empty the clipboard when you no
longer need its contents. All it takes is a click of the icon
installed in your taskbar tray.